Creating Impossible Viral Videos And Intimate Viewing Experiences

At Rhizome’s Seven on Seven event, Tumblr Founder, David Karp paired up with new media artist, Ryan Trecartin, to imagine better ways of interacting with online video aggregators such as YouTube.

They were interested in how a site’s environment influences communities, conversations, interactions, and the tone of content.

While current video aggregators encourage users to talk about the video, the team wondered whether it was possible for users to participate in curating the video narrative. Similar to how a community exists around a Wikipedia topic, could a community change, update, and nurture a video experience?

From this thinking, they created Project Ten, a streamed playlist of ten second videos users upload and tag. Viewers then choose tags to direct the path of content discovery, but never select a specific video. Because each video is only ten seconds long, and there’s no navigation to revisit a video, the fleeting experience appears and users may never see it again.